New from Cambridge University Press!

Edited By Keith Allan and Kasia M. Jaszczolt

This book "fills the unquestionable need for a comprehensive and up-to-date handbook on the fast-developing field of pragmatics" and "includes contributions from many of the principal figures in a wide variety of fields of pragmatic research as well as some up-and-coming pragmatists."

This monograph is a theoretical and empirical investigation into themechanisms and causes of successful and unsuccessful adult second languageacquisition. Couched within a generative framework, the study explores howa learner's first language and the age at which they acquire their secondlanguage may contribute to the L2 knowledge that they can ultimatelyattain. The empirical study focuses on a group of very advanced L2speakers, and through a series of tests aims to discover what underpinstheir near mastery of grammatical gender and other grammaticalproperties.The book explores an account of persistent selective divergencebased on the idea that child and adult learners are fundamentally similar,except that in adults the L1 plays the role of a fairly rigid filter of thelinguistic input. The impossibility of representing the new target languageother than by using the building blocks of the previously established L1 isargued to be the main reason why near but not totally native like languagerepresentations are formed and become established in adult L2 learners.